Software Engineering Collaboration 8

Our Open Rooms group is making a lot of headway. The developers completed one of our main goals already. They have updated the default editing capabilities to make it easier for the administration to set up and make time changes. They have also changed all of the CSS code to Bootstrap so now they will be able to make CSS changes very quickly and achieve our second goal which is to make the program look and feel more like the library website. We hit a roadblock with our third goal because we would need to change our library website over to https in order to make LDAP work with the program. The product owners are currently discussing the implications of rushing this change through before school starts. We may have to put this project in the "parking lot" for now.

Software Engineering Collaboration 7

 The past two weeks have been exciting. We are getting to actual get into the code and really start working on our end goals. We finally have everything set up and running so our sprints are becoming "fun." It will be exciting to be able to see changes on the program in the near future.

Last week we figured out that our backlog stories were too broad. We had to evaluate each of them and think about how we could break them down into smaller sprints that could be completed in one week. Our team is also naturally dividing into smaller teams/pairs as they realize their strengths or areas of interest. Allen and Tyler have jumped head first into the CSS changes. Kevin, since he works in IT, is doing research on how to implement LDAP with our program. Jacob and Hannah have already made big strides on working directly with the code for entering default hours into the program.

One issue brought up in class that our team needs to work on is writing stories instead of just listing tasks in our backlog. If I'm understanding them correctly this means writing the tasks in end user language. As a < type of user >, I want < some goal > so that < some reason >.

Escape Room Report

The escape room was a success - well kind of! Only one team "sort of" escaped in the twenty minute time period. They actually did it twenty-two minutes so we gave them "bragging rights" since no other teams made it as far as they did. 84 students came to game night and twelve teams attempted to escape. It went so smoothly that we decided to offer Faculty and Staff an opportunity to test it out on the day of the Spring Fair. We actually set up two duplicate rooms that day and twelve teams went through in three hours. Unfortunately, none of the groups were not able escape. Everyone had a great time! Now, we are considering offering it to our students for a small fee to offset the cost of the extra staff we would need to run it.

Everyone LOVED the button makers and even made some really creative buttons. Word spreads quickly, students are already asking when we will be putting them out for anyone to make.